_random_
Jewel Runner
Any good resources (ideally availible online) discussing Social Trinitiarianism and Latin Trinitarianism?
Ask a Theologian IV
- Thread starter Plotinus
- Start date
- Status
So you don't think that an instance in which the Catholic church objectively ceased to adhere to Christian tradition suffices?
GhostWriter16
Deity
So you don't think that an instance in which the Catholic church objectively ceased to adhere to Christian tradition suffices?
I'm not even sure what question you're answering... I was asking about the historical roots of Protestant ideas... Unless Orthodox ideas are linked to Protestant ones somehow...
timtofly
One Day
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2009
- Messages
- 9,445
Even the Protestants had "Protesters". If you think that the Protestants of today are the same as those 500 years ago, you have not been paying attention to Plotinus. Most Catholics and Protestants today observe rituals that have been passed down Sunday after Sunday. That has little to do with the doctrines that shaped those rituals. People just do them, they do not analyze why they do them.
I do not think that any one can pinpoint a time when the church, "fell away", or even "drifted". The Church at Rome was just another local church. The Church at Alexandria was just another local church. Why did one fade into the past? Why did one place a Pope and make a political statment, causing a great schism? I do not think that any human is going to say anything else than their opinion on the matter. I am sure there are a lot of great ideas written by many great thinkers, but they are more guesses than windows revealing every human soul involved in each historical moment.
Evangelicals are so new to the scene that referencing them as experts on the subject is like asking for a new revelation from God. Not that it cannot happen, but if it did, it would be a movement forward and not based on issues in the past.
The whole point being that every religion claims to have the word of God on their side and that everyone else is at least mistaken, if not outright wrong. Some faiths are simply much more vocal about this than others.
timtofly
One Day
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2009
- Messages
- 9,445
If you mean the Bible, then it is an open book for all to see. If you mean some mystical, only we are in the know, then how can a human be trusted with handling such knowledge, without it being hearsay?
The written word is a powerful tool, not that other religions do not have their writings. It is how they got their writings that are interesting to say the least. It is kind of hard to dispute the giving of the Law in the sight of 2 million witnesses, although after so many generations people began to disagree on even that. As for the hundreds even thousands of manuscripts in circulation early CE, eventually things were "hammered" into an acceptable "document" even though it is highly contested yet today. The fact that there were even manuscripts should hold enough weight on their own merit, even if people disagree on the content.
The "attempt" to put the record so people could read it was in and of itself an open revelation. It was not supposed to be one's own interpretation, but a group acceptance of the record, that God did communicate to humanity on the whole. At least those who were willing to read and listen.
If someone can come up with a record that they received in private and convince people that it is from God, then they have established a religion. It seems though that it is hard enough to get facts straight from a multitude of perspectives on the same points, as opposed to try to enforce a few points on people who never personally witnessed said facts.
timtofly
One Day
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2009
- Messages
- 9,445
Especially that one, since it deals with more than history?
EDIT: I've just moved this and the following posts from GhostWriter16's Catholicism vs. Protestantism thread, which is why they're a bit out of order with the others.
Even if we accept that argument, my point is that Jesus' doesn't give an opinion on the meaning of the word "Christian" in the Gospels, so even if he could have given a definitive pronouncement on it, we don't have that pronouncement.
Is a Christian "someone who follows Christ", though? Who says? What if a Christian is someone who identifies with the cultural and moral values historically associated with Christianity? You may use the word exclusively to mean the former, but other people use it to mean the latter - as well as plenty of other meanings.
I assume that it means that those who are, in some sense, mystically united to Christ will achieve good things. I don't see any reason to suppose that it's an attempt to define a term, let alone a term that doesn't appear in that passage or indeed anywhere else in that entire book (John's Gospel).
On the issue of Jesus' omniscience, I think the usual position among theologians today, whether Catholic or Protestant, is that he was at the very least not operationally omniscient.
The traditional view is that Christ had two kinds of knowledge, divine knowledge and human knowledge. His human knowledge was accessible by his human nature but his divine knowledge was not. That is why he says he doesn't know the scheduling of the eschaton. However, his human knowledge was as perfect as human knowledge can be, meaning that he knew everything a human being could know. It would presumably follow that Jesus could speak French, knew how to strip an internal combustion engine, and other unlikely things. This is at least the implicit view of the medieval theologians like Aquinas.
Today, many theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, still accept the "two kinds of knowledge" view but they reject the notion that Christ's human knowledge was perfect in that way. This is partly because it seems so intrinsically absurd, partly because it contradicts those passages of the New Testament where Jesus is portrayed as ignorant in various ways, and partly because it's at odds with the notion that Jesus was like us in every way except sin.
On this view, even though Jesus was God, and even though he was omniscient (in his divinity), he still could not have answered just any question put to him, because his knowledge (in his humanity) was as limited as anyone else's.
Kenotic theologians reject even the "two kinds of knowledge" thing and say instead that Christ was, quite straightforwardly, not omniscient at all. But whether kenoticism is orthodox is questionable (indeed, precisely what kenoticism even is seems to be a matter of debate). The common view I have just described is wholly consistent with Christian orthodoxy.
I don't see why. It's not as if the Bible actually says that Jesus was God.
(There are one or two places where it says, more or less, that he was divine - but that's not quite the same thing.)
Besides, the Bible is a collection of books, not a premise.
Jesus also said that the Father was greater than himself.
In fact of course Jesus almost certainly said neither of these things, since both appear in John's Gospel, and almost all the sayings attributed to Jesus in that Gospel are almost certainly inauthentic. That only destroys the premise of the Bible if you think that the premise of the Bible is that everything in the Bible is true, but there's nothing about the Bible to suggest such a view, and Christians aren't obliged to believe it. (The Nicene Creed, after all, says absolutely nothing about the Bible, other than the rather vague claim that Jesus' actions were in accordance with scripture.)
I know this is going off-topic, but it astounds me that anyone who's read the Bible could think that. The Bible is not clear on Trinitarianism at all. Nowhere in the Bible will you find the claim that God is three persons in one substance. In fact the words "persons" and "substance" are not applied to God at all. Terms such as the infamous homoousius (consubstantial) do not appear in the Bible, which is one reason why the Arians bitterly argued against their adoption in Christian creeds. And on that, as on a number of things, the Arians did kind of have a point.
What you do find in the Bible are are series of rather vague and nebulous ideas that are consistent with Trinitarianism but also consistent with alternatives to Trinitarianism. The closest thing to a Trinitarian statement that I know of in the New Testament is Matthew 28:19, where the disciples are instructed to baptise in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But that's just a list of names. Tritheism would be consistent with that! There is nothing about how they relate to each other.
There are also, of course, the various statements about the Father and the Son found in John's Gospel, but these effectively boil down to alternately identifying and distinguishing the Father and the Son, without any consistent explanation of what their relation is. That's not Trinitarianism.
Finally, of course, Proverbs 8:22 was the great Arian proof-text to disprove Trinitarianism. Even if one rejects this interpretation of it, one could hardly say that the Bible is "crystal clear" on the matter.
Actually it refers not to protest against the Catholic Church, but against the Diet of Speyer of 1529, which repeated the decisions of the Diet of Worms.
Even if we accept that argument, my point is that Jesus' doesn't give an opinion on the meaning of the word "Christian" in the Gospels, so even if he could have given a definitive pronouncement on it, we don't have that pronouncement.
Is a Christian "someone who follows Christ", though? Who says? What if a Christian is someone who identifies with the cultural and moral values historically associated with Christianity? You may use the word exclusively to mean the former, but other people use it to mean the latter - as well as plenty of other meanings.
I assume that it means that those who are, in some sense, mystically united to Christ will achieve good things. I don't see any reason to suppose that it's an attempt to define a term, let alone a term that doesn't appear in that passage or indeed anywhere else in that entire book (John's Gospel).
On the issue of Jesus' omniscience, I think the usual position among theologians today, whether Catholic or Protestant, is that he was at the very least not operationally omniscient.
The traditional view is that Christ had two kinds of knowledge, divine knowledge and human knowledge. His human knowledge was accessible by his human nature but his divine knowledge was not. That is why he says he doesn't know the scheduling of the eschaton. However, his human knowledge was as perfect as human knowledge can be, meaning that he knew everything a human being could know. It would presumably follow that Jesus could speak French, knew how to strip an internal combustion engine, and other unlikely things. This is at least the implicit view of the medieval theologians like Aquinas.
Today, many theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, still accept the "two kinds of knowledge" view but they reject the notion that Christ's human knowledge was perfect in that way. This is partly because it seems so intrinsically absurd, partly because it contradicts those passages of the New Testament where Jesus is portrayed as ignorant in various ways, and partly because it's at odds with the notion that Jesus was like us in every way except sin.
On this view, even though Jesus was God, and even though he was omniscient (in his divinity), he still could not have answered just any question put to him, because his knowledge (in his humanity) was as limited as anyone else's.
Kenotic theologians reject even the "two kinds of knowledge" thing and say instead that Christ was, quite straightforwardly, not omniscient at all. But whether kenoticism is orthodox is questionable (indeed, precisely what kenoticism even is seems to be a matter of debate). The common view I have just described is wholly consistent with Christian orthodoxy.
I don't see why. It's not as if the Bible actually says that Jesus was God.
(There are one or two places where it says, more or less, that he was divine - but that's not quite the same thing.)
Besides, the Bible is a collection of books, not a premise.
Jesus also said that the Father was greater than himself.
In fact of course Jesus almost certainly said neither of these things, since both appear in John's Gospel, and almost all the sayings attributed to Jesus in that Gospel are almost certainly inauthentic. That only destroys the premise of the Bible if you think that the premise of the Bible is that everything in the Bible is true, but there's nothing about the Bible to suggest such a view, and Christians aren't obliged to believe it. (The Nicene Creed, after all, says absolutely nothing about the Bible, other than the rather vague claim that Jesus' actions were in accordance with scripture.)
I know this is going off-topic, but it astounds me that anyone who's read the Bible could think that. The Bible is not clear on Trinitarianism at all. Nowhere in the Bible will you find the claim that God is three persons in one substance. In fact the words "persons" and "substance" are not applied to God at all. Terms such as the infamous homoousius (consubstantial) do not appear in the Bible, which is one reason why the Arians bitterly argued against their adoption in Christian creeds. And on that, as on a number of things, the Arians did kind of have a point.
What you do find in the Bible are are series of rather vague and nebulous ideas that are consistent with Trinitarianism but also consistent with alternatives to Trinitarianism. The closest thing to a Trinitarian statement that I know of in the New Testament is Matthew 28:19, where the disciples are instructed to baptise in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But that's just a list of names. Tritheism would be consistent with that! There is nothing about how they relate to each other.
There are also, of course, the various statements about the Father and the Son found in John's Gospel, but these effectively boil down to alternately identifying and distinguishing the Father and the Son, without any consistent explanation of what their relation is. That's not Trinitarianism.
Finally, of course, Proverbs 8:22 was the great Arian proof-text to disprove Trinitarianism. Even if one rejects this interpretation of it, one could hardly say that the Bible is "crystal clear" on the matter.
Actually it refers not to protest against the Catholic Church, but against the Diet of Speyer of 1529, which repeated the decisions of the Diet of Worms.
timtofly
One Day
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2009
- Messages
- 9,445
Since you brought up Proverbs 8:22 in the other thread, and you have studied Arianism more than I, I have this question. Whom were the Arians attributing this passage to?
I will go ahead and put my opinion in also. The Trinity is made up of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as the descriptive terms in the NT. Whether one admits to a cohesion or not, those are the three-in-one.
In the OT it is a liitle less noticable, but you have God, the Lord (physical appearances) and Wisdom. In my opinion, the voice, the "word", the Lord as pointed out in John 1 is the logos. The term wisdom, is not the logos. Verse 22 has the LORD (God), wisdom, and the way.
In Luke 3:22 there is the Father, the Son, and a spirit that descended like a dove. It was not a dove. I do not think that Luke was trying to create a Trintiy here. I do not think that Jesus even needed this approval to be who He was, the Christ. I think that it was just an event to validate to humans that there is a Trinity. We already see it in Proverbs, why would we need to create it again after hundreds of years?
I would also like to point out that in Proverbs 8:36 It clearly says that Wisdom if ignored leads to death. It seems to me that this is re-iterated in Mathew 12:32 when one speaks against the Holy Spirit. In fact, it seems to me that the soul is more effected by our response to the Spirit of God, than what the mind thinks about God or even the way to God: Jesus Christ.
When I say that the Bible has a premise, that would be it. How does God relate to man drawing man to Himself? It is not a human effort that does so. Modern man is appalled by the Biblical God. Christians have not set a much better example. In my opinion, it does not matter what man's knowledge has done when it comes to the Bible. One can take it or leave it. I do not mean that in a harsh way, what I am trying to say is that trusting any one's opinion of the Bible is not the key to the Bible. It has to be God, that provides the key.
I will go ahead and put my opinion in also. The Trinity is made up of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as the descriptive terms in the NT. Whether one admits to a cohesion or not, those are the three-in-one.
In the OT it is a liitle less noticable, but you have God, the Lord (physical appearances) and Wisdom. In my opinion, the voice, the "word", the Lord as pointed out in John 1 is the logos. The term wisdom, is not the logos. Verse 22 has the LORD (God), wisdom, and the way.
In Luke 3:22 there is the Father, the Son, and a spirit that descended like a dove. It was not a dove. I do not think that Luke was trying to create a Trintiy here. I do not think that Jesus even needed this approval to be who He was, the Christ. I think that it was just an event to validate to humans that there is a Trinity. We already see it in Proverbs, why would we need to create it again after hundreds of years?
I would also like to point out that in Proverbs 8:36 It clearly says that Wisdom if ignored leads to death. It seems to me that this is re-iterated in Mathew 12:32 when one speaks against the Holy Spirit. In fact, it seems to me that the soul is more effected by our response to the Spirit of God, than what the mind thinks about God or even the way to God: Jesus Christ.
When I say that the Bible has a premise, that would be it. How does God relate to man drawing man to Himself? It is not a human effort that does so. Modern man is appalled by the Biblical God. Christians have not set a much better example. In my opinion, it does not matter what man's knowledge has done when it comes to the Bible. One can take it or leave it. I do not mean that in a harsh way, what I am trying to say is that trusting any one's opinion of the Bible is not the key to the Bible. It has to be God, that provides the key.
GhostWriter16
Deity
OK, I missed this part when I quoted John 1:1 above. But saying "Trinitarianism is obvious from a Biblical perspective) implies the Bible is true anyways. How do you know the sayings of Jesus in John were inauthentic? And to what degree does this view assume the Bible is a mere human compilation and subject to error? Is there actually PROOF John is inauthentic, or is it simply a logical conclusion that the man who wrote John couldn't have known what Jesus said? (If so, of course, inspiration of the Bible by the Holy Spirit would make this logical conclusion not so clear-cut.)
If you pick and choose what you believe in the Bible (As you did when you said John's gospel isn't legitimate, which, being agnostic yourself anyways, is fairly predictable) maybe, but if you look at the whole Bible, it seems fairly obvious to me. As I said, John 1:1.
What is the context of this verse? And what are the arguments for and against that interpretation?
What was the Diet of Speyer exactly?
GhostWriter16
Deity
I didn't even know that the "Word" in John 1:1 referring to Christ was even disputed... In fact, I don't see how it could be disputed, if you read the rest of the chapter...
Well John 1:14 says that the Word was made flesh [presumably as Jesus], but that doesn't mean that Jesus was the Word, as it were. The flesh itself would be Jesus the mortal, but that doesn't hold that the Divine Word was still Jesus in 1:1.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
"I didn't know about X debate, but now I do, I'm going to ignore it anyway" is becoming a motif of yours, isn't it?
GhostWriter16
Deity
@Plotinus- Does this view even have ANY place in orthodox Christian doctrine?
I'm not ignoring it, so much as waiting for some clarification from our resident theologian.
OK, I get what you are getting at. As seems to be the case, I really do want to understand the historrical roots of my own faith, but obviously, everyone I know IRL has a bias towards Evangelical Christianity, and most of the people on here are biased against it
Oh, I'm totally biased against it (I recently discovered, to my discomfort, that I still have a much more visceral reaction against evangelicalism than I thought I did), so take everything I say with a pinch of salt. Of course you should take everything everyone says with a pinch of salt. I should say that I do admire the way you ask these questions. I hope you don't ever stop, no matter what answers you arrive at.
The way one interprets the Bible, whether it's a matter of trying to emulate the early church or anything else, will always depend upon both what books you consider biblical and also whether, and how, you consider them to be inspired. That's pretty straightforward. What makes things difficult is that there are lots of different viewpoints here, on both issues. On the issue of the canon, it's not simply a case of Catholic canon vs. Protestant one. There are other canons, such as the Ethiopian ones. There are also disputed sections of books, such as the ending of Mark. These usually have little doctrinal impact, although 1 John 5:7 is an exception - whether one thinks that this verse is canonical or not will make a different to whether one thinks the doctrine of the Trinity is biblical or not.
More importantly, I think, there are lots of different approaches to the question of inspiration. It's not simply a case of thinking either that the Bible is divinely inspired, infallible, inerrant, and true in all (spiritual) matters or that it has no authority at all and is just like other books. Few Christians think the second of these (although I'm sure some do), but not all think the first. There are a lot of intermediary positions as well. So it's not simply a matter of one's interpretation being affected by whether one believes in biblical infallibility or not. It's also a matter of which of the many intermediary positions one might hold.
On the question of whether one can consistently hold biblical infallibility, I would be inclined to say not, because there are contradictions within the Bible. For example, the Synoptics state that Jesus was crucified on the day of Passover, while John states that he was crucified on the day before Passover. Now if you think the Bible is infallible you must think that both of these things are true, which is inconsistent. Of course, it's not quite that simple, because believers in biblical infallibility always have ways to wriggle around things of this kind, although some of them are pretty implausible (e.g. suggesting that Jesus cleansed the Temple twice - once at the start of his career, as in John, and once at the end, as in the Synoptics). With a bit of ingenuity you can make even the most explicit contradictions into non-contradictions, no matter how implausible the argument, and so I think that it's always possible for believers in biblical infallibility to dodge the inconsistency objection if they try hard enough. However, by doing so they always succumb to a plausibility objection. What I mean is: if you're already committed to the doctrine of biblical infallibility, you can probably defend that doctrine as, in theory, possible. But if you're not already committed to that doctrine, and you're wondering whether it's true or not, the evidence is well against you. E.g. it could be the case that Jesus cleansed the Temple twice, but it seems more plausible to suppose that this major event happened only once and that one or more of the Gospel authors is mistaken about the sequence of events. The more of these things there are (and there are a lot), the more plausible that hypothesis becomes.
This is why I think that most people who believe in biblical infallibility do so for non-biblical reasons. They believe it because it's something that's been taught to them, either from childhood, or in a package together with other Christian doctrines when they converted to Christianity. Having believed it, they then read the Bible in its light and interpret the Bible accordingly. I think that very few people read the Bible without a prior commitment to biblical infallibility and then come to believe that doctrine from reading the Bible, because if you read the Bible in that spirit then a rejection of biblical infallibility would seem much more plausible than believing it.
That's not exactly an answerable question, because theological accuracy isn't something that's amenable to historical investigation. But if you're taking "theologically accurate" in a modern evangelical sense, to mean "believing what modern evangelicals believe", then I would say the view is quite mistaken, because the ancient church did not believe what modern evangelicals believe. Certainly Augustine did not and neither did the other theologians of his day or the preceding generations. To name just two obvious differences, Augustine believed that the Old Testament was divinely inspired when it was translated into Greek, not when it was originally written in Hebrew; and he thought it was impossible that anyone who voluntarily remains outside the Catholic Church could be saved. I don't think that any modern evangelicals would accept those views. Evangelicals often cite Augustine as a positive figure, I think, for two reasons: first, his sustained campaign against Pelagianism and corresponding emphasis on grace; and, second, the very personal and intimate tone in which he writes, particularly when addressing God, and particularly in his Confessions. Both of these things appeal to evangelicals. Also, Augustine has a very rational, common-sense way of writing, which also (contrary to popular belief) appeals to evangelicals, who are usually surprisingly rationalist.
My view would be that the Catholic Church never "fell away" in this sense because there was never a time when it was "unfallen" in this sense. I mean, there never was a time in antiquity when Christians believed what modern evangelicals do. Evangelicalism is a modern development. Many of its distinctive doctrines are much older than evangelicalism, but their coming together into the form they have taken in evangelicalism is modern. There were no evangelicals in the Middle Ages, none in late antiquity, and none in the time of the New Testament either - although in all of these periods there were Christians who believed some things that modern evangelicals would approve of, together with other things that they wouldn't.
So I would say that the question "When did the church stop being evangelical?" is the wrong question - a better one would be "When did (some parts of) the church start being evangelical?"
Unfortunately that answer isn't one that a real evangelical would approve of, since one of the doctrines that are very important to evangelicals is that evangelicalism itself is true Christianity and is, at the very least, the form of Christianity found in the New Testament. I suppose an evangelical who was deeply familiar with the writings of the church fathers, if there are any, would have to say that the church fell away pretty much immediately after the New Testament period. But that would then take him back to the problem of how to be sure that the canon of the New Testament was the correct one, since that was (obviously) settled some time after the New Testament period.
I don't really know. I suppose much as evangelicals who are not knowledgeable about church history do, but with more nuance. But this is something you might have to find out for yourself by reading the works of such educated evangelicals. Alister McGrath and Tom Wright are names that come to mind here.
I'd have thought that if they were viewed as deuterocanonical before Luther, the most reasonable thing to do would be to keep them as deuterocanonical, since that is what the church fathers saw fit to do with them. If removing them was preferable, why didn't the church fathers do that?
There's an excellent article by Brian Leftow entitled "Anti Social Trinitarianism", in which he basically destroys that position, and another one entitled "A Latin Trinity" in which he defends that one, and these have occasioned a lot of discussion. Unfortunately I don't think they're available online. But there is a good blog post here - and the three succeeding ones - on them. That blog in general has a lot of useful discussions on these topics.
The verse is part of a speech by the divine Wisdom. Ancient Christians took the divine Wisdom of the Wisdom literature to be identical with the Son. In this they took the lead of the prologue to John's Gospel, since the term Logos was closely connected with the concept of the divine Wisdom. Since, in Prov 8:22, Wisdom claims to be created, the Arians concluded that the Son must be a creature and not divine.
There can never be proof of any historical claim, at least not proof in the mathematical sense or even the scientific one. There can only be inference to the best explanation. In the case of John's Gospel, there are lots of reasons to think that the sayings attributed to Jesus are inauthentic; taken together, these make it much more likely that they are inauthentic than that they are authentic. That doesn't prove that they're inauthentic, and a person who is committed to believing that they're authentic can insist that they are without contradiction - but such an insistence will at least be contrary to the evidence.
The most basic reason for rejecting the authenticity of Jesus' sayings in John is that the style and content of Jesus' teaching in John is completely different from the Synoptics. In the Synoptics, Jesus teaches in parables and short memorable sayings. His main topic is the kingdom of God. He almost never talks about himself directly. When he does refer to himself, it is almost always as "the Son of Man". He makes no claims about himself. In John, Jesus teaches in long, repetitious discourses. He almost never mentions the kingdom of God and talks almost exclusively about himself. He refers to himself as "the Son" and makes a long series of high claims about himself.
Of course, it's possible that Jesus really did teach in two such very different ways, and that these two different sets of teaching were passed down independently by the early Christians, and somehow got recorded in two quite different sets of texts with almost no overlap between them. But it's more likely that one of these sets of texts more accurately represents the real Jesus than the other. Scholars almost universally agree that the Synoptics represent the real Jesus more accurately than John does, and that the kinds of things he talks about in the Synoptics are likely to be the kinds of things he really did talk about.
John 1:1 doesn't teach the doctrine of the Trinity. It merely says that the Logos is with God, is divine, and was involved in creation. That is not the Trinity. Theologians of the second century such as Justin Martyr, Tatian of Syria, Athenagoras, and Theophilus of Antioch built an entire theology on the basis of the prologue of John, and they were emphatically not Trinitarians. Why? Because the doctrine of the Trinity states far more than this. It states that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one substance and three persons, all fully divine, and equal in all respects other than priority. John 1:1 does not say anything at all about the Holy Spirit, so from that point of view it doesn't even try to be Trinitarian. It is also quite consistent with the view that although the Logos is in some sense divine he is inferior to the Father. That is precisely the view of those second-century theologians I just listed. Their "Logos theology" held that the Father is eternal but infinitely remote from the world, so he speaks forth his own reason (Logos) and it becomes a word (Logos). This is an event that happens in time, so before it occurred, the Logos existed only within the Father. When the Logos was spoken, he created the physical world, and continues to act as an intermediary between the Father and the world.
This is emphatically not Trinitarian theology, because it denies that the Father and Logos are equal in dignity and rank, it denies that the Logos is co-eternal with the Father, it conceives of the Logos as coming into existence solely for the purpose of creating and sustaining the universe (as opposed to existing eternally distinct from the Father as an expression of the fundamental nature of God), and it has no role whatsoever for the Holy Spirit, since the Logos acts as the sole intermediary between the Father and the universe. (The second-century theologians had very little conception of the Holy Spirit.) It has no concept of consubstantiality. But this theology was not only consistent with John 1:1, it was basically founded upon it. It's therefore quite wrong to say that John 1:1 teaches the doctrine of the Trinity. That doctrine evolved from Logos theology, but it took a long time to do so. The very fact that it took so long to do so should be proof enough that it's not taught unambiguously in the New Testament.
The context is the one I mentioned before. The argument for this interpretation is the supposition that anything attributed in the Old Testament to Wisdom should be attributed to the Son. The argument against that interpretation is - well, that it shouldn't be. Either way the argument is purely theological rather than textual.
Plus, the precise translation of the verse in question is disputable too. "Created" is a translation of the Septuagint, but the original Hebrew is rather different. So if, unlike the early Christians, you don't care what the Septuagint says, the verse becomes irrelevant.
It's worth noting, though, that ancient anti-Arian writers such as Athanasius didn't argue like this. They agreed with the Arians that the verse says "created", and they agreed that it should be attributed to the Son. They therefore spent a lot of energy arguing that "created" doesn't really mean "created" in this verse. This in itself tells us a lot about how ancient Christians thought. They assumed that pretty much any passage from the Bible was relevant to pretty much any topic. The notion that this verse wasn't relevant to the question of the Son's divinity simply didn't occur to them.
It is pretty much the dominant orthodox view. On this view, the Son became incarnate in Jesus not by being transformed into him but by entering into a certain relation with him. So the Logos is not Jesus, and Jesus is not the Logos. They are, however, a single person, because Jesus has no existence other than as hypostatically united to the Logos. This is why you can't straightforwardly attribute divine properties to Jesus or human properties to the Logos. Christ dies, but he dies in his human nature - the Logos doesn't die, strictly speaking, even though the Logos and Jesus are the same person. Conversely, the world is created through Christ, but only through his divine nature - the world isn't created through Jesus, even though, again, the Logos and Jesus are the same person.
The notion that the Logos and Jesus are literally identical, so that the Logos became incarnate by literally being transformed into a human person, is condemned by Athanasius and various others, but I don't know of any evidence that anyone in antiquity or the Middle Ages believed it. Some modern Christians have, though, notably Trenton Merricks.
GhostWriter16
Deity
Fair enough. You seem to be responding in a manner that isn't obviously biased towards any one idea, however. I don't think the vast majority of people are able to do that, myself included. I definitely have a proEvangelical bias, though I know its imperative to not view these particular issues through that lens.
Who exactly considered this verse (1 John 5:7) not canon and why?
Well, here's my question, if the Bible is NOT infallible, what good reason is there to believe it? I don't get how you can say that the Bible is not infallible, but is still inspired. Its a form of cherry picking, as far as I see it, and allows you to effectively choose which doctrines you like and which doctrines you don't like, and just follow the ones you like. I guess you can argue tthat this is what is done by all Christians anyway, but that certainly isn't the justification we use, and it (Picking and choosing) does not seem like a good basis on which to build a theology, at least not to me.
That's true inb my case, yes. But I don't see why you'd be trying to build a theology from the Bible anyway if you didn't already believe in some form of Biblical infallibility.
Well, why did the church fathers think that the Old Testament was only infallible after it was translated into Greek? That obviously was not the intent of the authors, who wrote it into Hebrew.
As for the Catholic Church, were there any actual Churches other than the Catholic Church back then?
I want to respond to the rest of this, but I have to run. I'll be back
Jehoshua
Catholic
- Joined
- Sep 25, 2009
- Messages
- 7,284
There were heretical sects pretty much from the get go, Ignatius of Antioch rails against heresy only decades after the death and ressurection of Christ in those writings of his that remain. If you count gnostics, marcionites, montanists and other such early christian heretics as being legitimate Churches then of course there were others.
- Status
